‘We can’t just – starve to death?! This isn’t like me at all! It’s this life – it turns you into a beast!’
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Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf
Papa Hamlet
Translated by James J. Conway
Design by Svenja Prigge
18 October 2021
178 pages, trade paperback
115 x 178 mm, French flaps
ISBN: 978-3-947325-11-5
Distribution
UK/Ireland (Central Books)
US (SPD)
Adultery, vulgarity, disordered lives on the brink of collapse: the feverish existence of failed actor Niels Thienwiebel shocked German readers when Papa Hamlet was first published in 1889. In declaiming the soliloquies of his most famous role, ‘the great Thienwiebel’ finds delusional refuge from the squalid room he shares with despondent wife Amalie and infant son Fortinbras. But it was the radical style as much as the moral outrage of this novella that so confounded contemporaries. Reflecting their own bohemian Berlin milieu, Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf showed the dream of the self-authored life turning to nightmare through apathy and self-absorption. Originally credited to a fabricated Norwegian writer, Papa Hamlet signalled the explosive arrival of Naturalism while also pointing ahead to Modernism; its appropriations, irony and play of identity even foretold Postmodernism. Appearing for the first time in English, it is teamed here with an early incarnation of the same narrative by Schlaf alongside further collaborations with Holz. Together their fearless candour and anarchic ingenuity reveal another side to German Naturalism that is well overdue for rediscovery.
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Just four years in duration, the collaboration between Arno Holz (1863-1929) and Johannes Schlaf (1862-1941) created a revolution in form and content which exerted a huge influence on German literature. As well as Papa Hamlet their partnership produced the play The Selicke Family, a number of shorter prose works and an autobiographical comic. After living and working in bohemian isolation just outside Berlin, the pair split acrimoniously in 1892 and continued sniping at each other for decades as they moved on from their Naturalist origins. Arno Holz was something of a tragic figure, consumed with bitterness; works like his verse collection Phantasus were years head of their time yet security eluded him. The more amenable Johannes Schlaf enjoyed greater success but his posthumous reputation suffers from his later embrace of the Nazis. Neither writer has previously appeared in English.
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Crisis upon crisis accumulates, while Thienwiebel shrieks out snippets from the Danish Play and warns of dark powers lurking beneath the city sidewalks […] It is hard to tell exactly what is going on in Papa Hamlet, and even harder to tell who is speaking, despite the total absence of anything remotely fantastic or uncanny. Most contemporary reviewers thought it was a bad joke on the reader, but like Tristram Shandy, the book was a great success with both the public and the intellectuals. It has now been part of German school curricula for well over a century. Rixdorf Editions offers the Anglophone world this influential classic for the first time, collected with the authors’ other fugitive pieces, and rendered as painlessly as possible (but with the right agony) by the brilliant translator, James J. Conway.
– Martin Billheimer, CounterPunch
The title novella Papa Hamlet and the stories that accompany it depict the squalor and hopelessness of impoverished tenement living—chronic unemployment, food insecurity, physical abuse of children and wives, mental illness, and alcoholism—with nary a shred of romanticism or hope for better. […] James J. Conway provides an excellent Afterward that places Holz and Schlaf’s oeuvre within its literary and historical context, demonstrating how the authors’ techniques anticipated Modernist and Post-Modernism expression.
– Tom Bowden, Book Beat
… it is a veritable picture of misery, the sordidness of which is made manifest not in lengthy descriptive passages, but in the sharpness of detail […] Papa Hamlet is only 50 pages long, but it is such an intense read. Rixdorf Editions has supplemented it with more stories, jointly penned by Holz and Schlaf, plus Schlaf’s original tale, A Garret Idyll, which was reworked into Papa Hamlet. That makes for an interesting compare and contrast exercise. There is also an extensive afterword by James J Conway about Naturalism in Germany, the role Holz and Schlaf had in developing it, and in-depth analysis of Papa Hamlet in particular.
– Lizzy Siddal, Lizzy’s Literary Life
Farcical, funny, tragic, and amazingly ahead of its time, the prose reminds me of Alfred Döblin in its crazy vigor and its use of disembodied dialogue. Thanks, Rixdorf!
– Bill Wallace
FROM THE AFTERWORD
Holz believed in the primacy of dialogue in literature, real dialogue, rendered with utmost fidelity to speech patterns, complete with discontinuities, interjections, repetitions, non-verbal utterances and a huge wealth of exclamation marks. Descriptive passages were fragmentary in exposition yet utterly precise in cataloguing the squalor of the characters and their environment. Once gentle, irony acquired a savage and bitter edge. You can almost see Arno Holz, sitting in his summer house, striking whole descriptive passages from Schlaf’s story [‘A Garret Idyll’], scribbling additions. The result is ‘Papa Hamlet’.
The claustrophobic setting and much of the outline of ‘A Garret Idyll’ survives. But the timeframe is uncertain, and there are lines of spoken text that cannot be assigned with certainty to a character or associated with a concurrent action, resulting in something more like a post-war avant-garde radio play than a 19th-century novella. The opening sentence is just one word, fittingly both question and expression of perplexity. From the scant ensuing details of the first section we are meant to surmise that Amalie has just given birth. The use of the pluperfect in the descriptive text is a further alienating factor, contrasting with the immediacy of the dialogue.
[...]
Just as striking as these features is, of course, the intertextual element – the extensive quotations from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, declaimed by Niels Thienwiebel and also threaded through descriptive passages. There was little precedent for a work so knowingly and rapaciously appropriating another – not refashioning or retelling, but recycling. [...] It is typical of the remorseless irony of ‘Papa Hamlet’ that the selfish, unprincipled, deeply unreflective Thienwiebel should mouth the words of the most famously self-scrutinising figure in the Western canon ...
‘Papa Hamlet’ by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf (originally credited to Bjarne P. Holmsen and ‘translated’ by Dr Bruno Franzius), title novella of the book Papa Hamlet, 1889
‘A Death’, the novella from the book Papa Hamlet, as above, 1889 (note: this book also contained ‘The First Day of School’, but this is generally considered to be the work of Arno Holz alone, and is not included here)
‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf in the persona of invented ‘translator’ Dr Bruno Franzius, 1889
New Foreword to ‘Papa Hamlet’ by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf in which they expose their own ‘translation’ deception, originally published in the anthology of their works, Neue Gleise (New Tracks), 1892
‘The Paper Passion’, a story by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf which first appeared in the journal Die Gesellschaft in 1890, and in book form in Neue Gleise, 1892
‘A Garret Idyll’ by Johannes Schlaf, a short story first published in Die Gesellschaft, 1890 but written some years earlier, which formed the basis for the novella ‘Papa Hamlet’
Afterword by the translator, James J. Conway
